Triton (Trouble on Triton) (16 page)

Audri’s eyes came back to his from somewhere behind him. “No. Why? I never saw her before Personnel sent her down yesterday morning.”

“Oh, because for a moment I ...” Bron frowned; suddenly he picked up the veiled and sequined head—

covering and put it on. With the thought had come the sudden recollection of exactly when (in the gray, canyon-like alley leading to u-1!) and why (that fanciful, unfounded relation between Miriamne and the Spike!) he had decided on Miriamne’s transfer. Now it seemed ridiculous, cruel (he
did
like Audri), and self-centered. If he could have, he
would
have kept her on now. But the green slip—“I don’t suppose she’s still ...” His voice was hollowed by the dark shell.

“Mmmm?” Audri said, sipping; his own bubble rattled loudly, collapsed completely. If the thought had been a world, the one that came with it, circling it like a satellite, was: Miriamne was the Spike’s friend. Some version of all this would in all likelihood get back to her. What would
she
think? “Audri?”

he asked.

“Yeah?”

“What am I like? I mean, what do you think of me ... ? If you had to describe me to somebody else, how would vou do it?”

“Honest?”

He nodded.

“I’d say you were a very ordinary—or special, depending on how you look at it—combination of well-intentioned and emotionally lazy, perhaps a little too self-centered for some people’s liking. But you also have an awful lot of talent at your job. Maybe the rest are just the necessary personality bugs that go along.”

“Would you say I was a louse ... but maybe a louse who was—never mind. Just a louse.”

Audri laughed. “Oh, perhaps an off-Thursdays—or on every second Tuesday of the month—some version of that thought flickers through my addled brain—”

“Yeah.” Bron nodded. “You know, that’s the third time in three days someone’s called me that.”

“A louse?” Audri raised one multicolored eyebrow (and lowered one silver one). “Well,
Ym
certainly not one of the ones who did—”

“You mean
Philip,
sometime earlier today, he ... ?”

Both Audri’s eyebrows lowered now. “No, doll.
You
did—just now.”

“Oh,” Bron said. “Well, yeah.”

Back in his office, Bron sat and ruminated and flung more collapsed coffee bulbs into the corner heap.

They don’t understand, he thought; then thought it over. Philip and Audri and Sam and Miriamne and Lawrence—even Danny (whom he remembered) and Marny (whom he remembered with some affection) didn’t understand. And Alfred probably understood least of all—though from another point of view, Alfred probably understood the best; that is, Alfred certainly didn’t understand
him
—Bron—but Alfred certainly understood by first-hand experience the feeling of having nobody understand you; and—Bron could allow himself the self-flagellation—in a way Alfred’s particular type of nonthinking was probably pretty close to his own. Yes, Alfred understood by experience, even if he had no articulate awareness of that experience as a possible point of agony for any other human being but himself. And didn’t (Bron was still thinking, five minutes after closing as he walked, with rustling sleeves and cloak, out of the lobby and onto the Plaza) Alfred’s complete refusal to offer anyone else any interpretation—speculative, appeasing, damning, or helpful—of their own psychological state represent a kind of respect, or at least a behavior that was indistinguishable from it? Alfred just assumed (but then, didn’t everybody assume, till you gave them cause to do otherwise) that you knew what you were about

.. •

Miriamne!

And Alfred’s drawn, adolescent face was blotted out He’d wanted to start an affair with her! She was his type. And now his own, involved, counterespionage against himself had lost her a job. His own responses that he should have used as flexible parameters he had taken as rigid, fixed perimeters. Miriamne!

Of course she didn’t understand either.

Poor Miriamne!

How could she know the how or the why behind any of what had happened to her?

Suffering the wound of having wounded, he thought:

Help me. He made his way through the crowded Plaza. The upper edge of the eyeholes completely cut away the sensory shield with a darkness complete as the u-l’s roof. Swathed and black, he made his way across the bustling concourse, thinking: Somebody help me ...

Just like Alfred (he thought), alone in his room, his nosebleed already diagnosed, Sam and the others gone, wishing desperately, now that the catastrophe had abated, that someone, anyone, would stop by and say hello.

Bron’s jaw tightened.

The mask slipped further down, so that—the thought came brutally as pain, and, with it, he swung his cloak across his shoulder and hurried on—had anyone tried to meet his eyes, with gaze friendly, provocative, hostile, or indifferent, he would not have been able to tell, since all but the very shortest in the crowd were now, muzzily, decapitated.

But if you want help that badly (bitterly he ground his teeth as someone brushed his shoulder; he jerked away, knocking into someone else’s) and you still can’t get it, the only thing to take your mind off the need is to help someone else:—which revelation, since it was one of the rare times he’d ever had it, brought him up short in the middle of the Plaza.

He stood, blinking: two people in succession bumped his left shoulder; one person stumbled against his right. When he stumbled, someone else hit him on the rebound and said: “Hey, watch, will you?

Where do you think you are?”

And he still stood, still blinking, in the half-veiled dark.

Somebody else stumbled against him.

And somebody else.

The green slip was already in. There
was
nothing he could do for Miriamne ... Five minutes later, he found the smaller of the sex shops on the southeast corner and, well-muffled in his cloak, asked for the reserved package of ointment that had already been credited. There! The sense of moral obligations already slipping from his encumbered soul

(and the tubular package in one of his cloak’s numerous, secret pockets), he walked out onto the (almost deserted now) Plaza of Light.

Ten minutes after that, with his heart thudding slowly, he entered the greenlit tiles of the underpass, passing unheeded the admonitions from chalk, paint, and poster, scrawled left and right. High and dim on the dark, one scrolled, archaic hand pointed to six, the other to seven. (Decimal clocks, he thought. Quaint.) He crossed the tracks, the gritty paving. He passed the high supports of an overhead walkway. Through the rails above, lights cast down a web of shadow. At the next steps—on a whim—he turned up, pulling all his rustling clothes about him. Bron gained the top.

They stood at the opposite rail, backs to him, looking out at a darkness that could have been a wall ten feet beyond or a night stripped of stars light years away.

He recognized her by the blonde, feathery hair, the high shoulders (no cloak now), the long curves of her back going down to a skirt, low on her hips: a ground-length swath, where brown and red and orange splotched one another like something from a postcard of an autumn hillside on another world. Bron slowed, halfway across the walk. The cloaks and veils and sleeves and cuffs that had billowed behind him collapsed around his gloves and boots.

The other—?

Matted hair held a hint of blue (or green?).

Except for fur strips bound around one thick, upper arm, and one stocky thigh, he was still naked. He was still filthy.

Bron stopped, ten feet away, frowning inside his mask (which, somewhere just beyond the underpass, he’d finally gotten to sit right), wondering at their quiet conversation. Suddenly she looked back.

So did the man. Within the scarred and swollen flesh the sunken spot (even this close he was not sure if it could or could not see) glistened.

“Bron ... ?” she said, turning fully to face him. Then: “That is you behind that mask ... ? Tethys
is
a small city! Fred here—” (Fred turned too; the chain necklaces hung down the grimed, overmuscled chest with its sunken, central pit.) “—and I were just talking about you, would you believe?”

The nails visible on Fred’s black-ringed and fouled fingers were quick-bitten. How, Bron wondered, could you bring yourself to bite them if your hands were that filthy—for which answer Fred raised one hand and began to gnaw absently, his visible, bloodshot eye blinking.

“Fred was just saying to me that he’d lived for a while on Mars. And on Earth too. You even spent some time on Luna, weren’t you saying?” (Fred gnawed on, regarding Bron from under shaggy brows and over blackened knuckles.) “Fred was saying he knew the Goebels—wasn’t that what you said the red-light district in Bellona was called, Fred? Fred was telling me what your gold eyebrow meant: That’s really amazing!—Well ... not only is it a small city. It’s a small universe!”

Fred gnawed. Fred blinked.

And Bron thought: The things people will do to their bodies. Just as those outsized muscles were conscientiously clinic-grown (No profession in light-gravity labor gave you those ballooning thighs and biceps, those shoulders, that stomach, with all heads evenly ridged), so the filth, the scars, the sores, the boils that speckled the grimed arms and hips were from conscientious neglect. And no one had genitals
that
size, other than by disease or (surgical) design. The Spike said: “... it really is odd, just standing here, talking about you and suddenly there you are, right behind—” Then Fred, still gnawing, suddenly stepped forward (behind the mask, Bron flinched), crossed in front of the Spike, and started down the walkway: a gentle thud of footsteps, a jangling of chains.

Bron said: “Your friend isn’t very communicative.”

“It’s his sect,” the Spike said. “He was telling me the Beasts are having quite a bit of trouble, recently. They’ve just reformed, you know, from an older sect that dissolved; and now it looked like they may dissolve again. Dian—do you remember her; she’s in our company—used to belong to the Beasts. She dropped out from them last month. Perhaps I’m biased, but I do believe she’s happier with us. The whole problem, I suppose, is that any time some piece of communication strikes poor Fred, or any of the remaining Beasts, for that matter, as possibly meaningful—or is it meaningless? It’s been explained to me a dozen times and I still can’t get it right—anyway, his religious convictions say he has to either stop it or—barring that—refuse to be a party to it. You can imagine how difficult this must make ecumenical decisions during a religious council. Shall we take a walk ... ?” She held out her hand, then frowned. “Or am I being presumptuous presuming you came to see
mel”

“I ... came to see you.”

“Well, thank you.” Her hand closed on his. “Then come.”

They walked by the railing.

He asked: “Was Fred part of your theater piece too? That whole, opening gambit when you first froze me in—” which was ice farmer slang that had passed, by way of the ice opera, into general use: but, a moment out, as he recalled her origin, it seemed an affectation, and he wished the phrase back.

“Ah ... !” She smiled at him. “And who’s to say where life ceases and theater begins—”

“Come on,” he said roughly, his own hesitation gone before her mild mocking. So she said: “Fred?” And shrugged. “Before that afternoon, I’d never seen him before in my life.”

“Then why were you talking to him here?”

“Well, because ...” She led him down some steps. “—he was there. And I mean, since he’d punched me in the jaw once, and at that most delicate moment in the production, when initial contact with the audience is being established, I thought that might stand in place of a formal introduction. Apparently, he’d observed some of our pieces already—he told me he liked them, too. I was trying to discover how he fit that in with the mission laid on him by his sect. That led, of course, into Bestial politics, and thence into his life story ... you know how it goes. I’d known something about it before from Dian, so I could make some intelligent comments; that naturally prejudiced him toward me; we started talking. As you might imagine, people with such commitments aren’t the most socially sought-after individuals. I think he misses civilized conversation. I really found him quite an astute fellow. The metaphysical trouble with Fred’s position, of course, is that communication involves minimum two people—more or less. Now,” as they reached the ground, “two people may be talking, intensely, eloquently, or anywhere in between. But at any point, what’s meaningful for one of them may become empty chatter for the other. Or the situation may reverse. Or the two situations may overlap. And all of these may happen a dozen times in any given five minutes.”

“Poor Fred,” Bron said dryly. (They turned into a narrow alleyway. The red street sign slid its miniaturized letters, dots, and dashes across her corneas watching him.) “Well, I’m glad he wasn’t part of the whole circus.”

“And I, as they say, am glad you’re glad. I was thinking about asking him if he wanted to join the company. You have to admit he’s colorful. And his performance, when I picked you up, certainly added a certain
je ne sals quoi.
If his sect
does
go bust, it would be tragic to let all that dedication just drift away! If I could only determine what his position was vis-a-vis theatrical communication itself—does he think it’s meaningful or not? Whenever he—or Dian—talks about it, they get terribly abstract. Perhaps I just better wait until he’s out of it. And you can tell he could use the job, just by looking at him.” Bron was about to release her hand, but suddenly she smiled at him. “And what brings you here, interrupting my theoretical reveries on your person and personality with, as it were, the real thing?”

He wanted to say:

I came to tell you that no matter what that crazed lesbian says, I am
not
responsible for her losing her job—no matter
what
kind of louse she thinks I am! “I came to find out about you, who you were and what you were.”

The Spike smiled up from under lowered brows. “All masked and veiled and swathed about in shadowy cerements? That’s romantic!” They entered an even narrower alley—were, he realized, actually inside. “Just a moment—” She stopped in front of what was, he recognized, her co-op room door—“and we’ll see what I can come up with to aid you in your quest. Out in a minute,” and she was gone inside: the door clicked closed.